Despite what some software manufacturers might want you to believe, staying on top of your finances doesn’t have to cost a lot. In fact, it doesn’t have to cost you a dime. And with these free and easy tools, you can manage your finances right from the comfort of your Internet browser.
Finance Managers
These tools look at the big picture, offering you a way to take control of your entire financial picture.
- Mint: See where your money goes with this automated online money manager.
- Wesabe: Join this social finance community to track your money and goals with a bit of help from your peers.
- ClearCheckbook: Stay on top of your spending, bank account, and more with ClearCheckbook.
- MoneyTrackin: With this accounting tool, you can track your money, get tips, and more.
- NetWorthIQ: Find out how your financial status stacks up against your peers with this social finance manager.
Taxes
Taxes may not be fun to do, but they’ll be easy with these tools.
- H&R Block Deduction Finder: Use this tool to identiy all of the deductions you can make on your tax return.
- TaxACT: This free tool will help you file a simple tax return.
- EFTPS: With this tax tool, you can make free estimated tax payments.
- H&R Block Tax Estimator: Answer simple questions about your life and income, and you’ll be able to estimate your taxes.
Savings & Investment
These tools will help you manage and discover the best ways to make your money grow.
- Savings Calculator: Find out how long it will take you to reach your savings goal with this calculator.
- The Prioritizer: Use CNN Money’s tool to rank your financial goals.
- Prosper: Using Prosper, you can give or get loans with other people.
- Tuition Savings Calculator: Find out how much you’ll have to save to go to college using this calculator.
- Investment Spreadsheet: Find out what your financial crossover point is with this spreadsheet.
- Millionaire Calculator: See when your nest egg will hit a million using this calculator.
- Zopa: Another social credit site, Zopa makes it fun and easy to get or loan money directly with peers.
- Retirement Planner: Use this calculator to figure out just how much you’ll need to save for retirement.
Credit & Debt
- Accelerated Debt Payoff Calculator: See what will happen if you make accelerated payments.
- Debt Reduction Planner: Find out how long it will take you to pay off your credit card debt with this calculator.
- Debt Consolidation Calculator: This calculator will help you decide if a debt consolidation loan is right for you.
- Loan Comparison Calculator: Use this calculator to compare up to three different loans side by side.
- Mortgage Calculator: Find out how much you’ll pay per month on your mortgage with this calculator that includes property tax, insuance, and appraised value.
- Alternative Payment Frequencies: Find out how your loan will change with different payment frequencies.
- Credit Assessment Calculator: Get a broad look at your credit situation with this calculator.
Group Money
Stay on top of shared expenses using these group money tools.
- Billshare: Figure out how to split bills fairly on shared expenses with Billshare.
- Buxfer: Manage group expenses with SMS and more using Buxfer.
- iOWEYOU: Share expenses, get reports, and more with iOWEYOU.
- BillMonk: BillMonk will help you remember borrowed money, split expenses, and track debts.
Income
These tools will help you grow your income and put it to work.
- PayScale: Find out if you’re being underpaid with this salary tool.
- Stay-at-Home Calculator: Consider whether or not it makes financial sense for one parent to stay at home using this calculator.
- Missing Money: Find unclaimed funds with this money search.
- Salary.com: Compare your salary to others in your area to see how you stack up and get ammunition for your raise request.
- Second Rotation: Get rid of old gadgets by selling them with Second Rotation.
- Cost-of-Living Calculator: Compare the cost of living in different US cities with this calculator.
Expenses
From budgeting to bills, these tools make staying on top of your expenses easier than ever.
- billQ: Track your bills and get reminders with billQ.
- Budginator: Prioritize your bills, food, entertainment, and more, and this tool will suggest how much you should pay for each.
- Equipment Buy vs. Lease: Find our if an outright purchase is right for you or not with this calculator.
- Xpenser: With Xpenser, you can track your spending from nearly anywhere with SMS, IM, voice or email inputs.
- Escrow: Use this tool to avoid scams when dealing with timed payments.
- Edmund’s True Cost to Own Calculator: Use factors like gas, repairs, and depreciation to find out exactly how much your car costs you.
- WhatBills?: Stay on top of your bills using this cool service.
- Home Energy Analyzer: Find out if you’re paying too much for energy, and learn what you can do about it with this quiz.
- PayPal: With this online payment system, you can pay for purchases, bills, and more.
Bargain Hunting
Use these tools to save money and find the best deals out there.
- MapQuest Gas Prices: MapQuest will help you find cheap gas, and even lets you look for alternative fuels.
- Rentometer: Compare your rent prices with others in your area using Rentometer.
- Cellfire: Get coupons on your mobile phone with this handy tool.
- WhiteFence: With WhiteFence’s service, you can compare utility providers head-to-head.
- PriceProtectr: Take advantage of price protection policies with this handy tool that tracks these purchases for you.
- Priceheat: Compare Amazon prices with this bookmarklet.
- MyRatePlan: Compare your rate plan with other carriers to find out if you’re getting the best deal or not.
- Frucall: With Frucall, you can compare prices right from your cell phone, available via call, SMS, or mobile web.
Other
Here you’ll find even more useful online money tools.
- ATM Locator: Find an ATM anywhere in the world with this mapping tool.
- InstaCalc: This online calculator offers calculations, sharing, and pre-loaded calculators.
- StuffSafe: Create an online inventory of your valuable possessions in case of theft or disaster.
- Payjr: Use this chore and allowance system to help give your kids a financial education.
- XE: Use this exchange rate calculator to plan vacations, investment and m
Although Digg gets the bulk of social media attention, del.icio.us is a powerful tool that’s not to be overlooked. It’s not quite as big and overpopulated, so del.icio.us offers nearly a perfect combination of easy entry and gameability. Here we’ll discuss a number of strategies you can use to dominate del.icio.us and see a massive influx of traffic and revenue.
- Control the first bookmarking: If you’ve established a rapport with popular users, call in a favor and ask them if they’d be willing to submit a particularly important piece for you. If your work is submitted under their name, it’s much more likely to get heavily bookmarked. In addition, a popular user is likely to know the sorts of titles that are most likely to succeed on Del.icio.us. And since the first bookmarking normally controls the article title on Del.icio.us, by having them submit on your behalf you’re getting free titling advice.
- Let the popular page dictate you: Don’t waste your time writing about stuff that may or may not get popular. Check out the popular page and the tag cloud to figure out what you should write about.
- Tag liberally: Bookmark your article with popular tags, even if they’re only marginally relevant to your article. Many del.icio.us users have favorite tags that they bookmark blindly, and you can benefit from this.
- Linkbait: For content that bookmarks well, your focus should be all about linkbaiting. Create content and titles that have a hook like resources, a news scoop, or some sort of important giveaway, and then deliver on it.
- Develop a bookmarking circle: Build a network of 10 or so friends that you can count on to bookmark your stories. These can be friends you already know, or just others you pick up along the way. SEO forums and AIM chats are great places to pick up voting friends.
- Locate popular users: Beyond regular friends, you’ve got to seek out the cool kids. Keep an eye on the front page to locate potential friends whose bookmarks spark others to follow suit. Although the “power user” doesn’t exist on Del.icio.us to the same degree it does on Digg or Reddit, there are still users who have a large following. Google their username to find their email or AIM contact info and make friends.
- Submit top stories from other sites: Your bookmarks shouldn’t all be your own work. In fact, it’s a good idea to build your reputation by submitting stories that are proven to be popular elsewhere. Browse Digg, Reddit, and other social media sites for content.
- Find a niche: By posting content in tags that aren’t wildly overpopulated but still popular (look for second tier terms on the popular cloud to find these terms), it’s easier to get traffic, and even better, targeted visitors that are more likely to bring conversions.
- Email your post to other bloggers: Seek out other bloggers in your niche and ask them to take a look at your post. Whether they bookmark it for later, or pick it up and share it with their readers, you’re golden either way.
- Take your ads down…for a day: Del.icio.us users aren’t crazy about ads, but you’ll be getting related traffic for a long time even after you’re not popular on del.icio.us anymore. So stay ad-free to get popular, but put them right back up once you get there.
- Hire strangers to bookmark you: There are loads of forums where you can find people who are willing to do bookmark trades for free or for hire. DigitalPoint’s Traffic and Freebies forums are two that seem to work well.
- Reciprocate: Find pages that link to your site, and bookmark them if they have relevant content. When they do well, so do you.
- Use commonly-searched terms: When titling your piece, or even just your submission, use terms that are popular on search engines. It’s helpful to use terms that are popular on your site’s own internal search engine as well, which will send you more qualified visitors.
- Get popular on a smaller site: Work to get popular on a niche social media site, and you’ll inevitably get a del.icio.us boost from the clickthroughs. You can prod things along by providing a link that makes it easy to bookmark your story.
- Link to revenue-producing pages: Instead of serving up ads that will turn del.icio.us users off, you can embed links to the pages in your site that help you earn revenue, like affiliate reviews and product pages. This way, you can still enjoy a revenue spike without earning annoyance from the community.
- Change your titles: If your existing title isn’t very bookmark-worthy, change your submission title to something else that’s likely to get more attention. As in, if you’re linking to a book that’s about SEO, but the term linkbait happens to be more popular, give your title a facelift with the more popular term, if only for del.icio.us. As we’ve mentioned, you can check out the popular page and the tag cloud for inspiration.
- Be ready for the traffic: Although del.icio.us isn’t going to send you Digg-size traffic, there’s always a chance that getting popular on the site will give you an overload of traffic and kill your server. Obviously, that’s not a good thing, because in the end you’ll lose traffic and revenue.
- Edit tags en masse according to popularity: If you’ve discovered that your once-hot tag has lost its charm, use Scripted Re-Mark to change all of your associated bookmarks to something better.
- Use catchy titles: Some titles just beg to be bookmarked, like “[Blank] Little Known Ways to [blank]”, and “What Everybody Ought to Know About [blank].” You can find these templates and more at Copyblogger. Often, you’ll get bookmarked even when someone hasn’t read your entire story.
- Make friendly URLs: If one page can by accessed via multiple URLs, you need to consolidate, or your bookmarks may get split up. Use redirects to keep this from happening.
